Comparative Study of IPv6 over IPv4

And Deployment Challenges

Mr. Sudhakar Mishra ,
Department of Information Technology
Walchand College of Engineering Sangli ,India
Sudhakar.mishra@walchandsangli.ac.in

Abstract
IPv6 is now enter the door of internet and
soon will become next Gen IP protocol.IPv6
has many added and modified featured from
IPv4.The impact of IPv6 on internet will be
far wide, which should be studied well.
Before deploying IPv6, one should know
what IPv6 is going to offer which IPv4 lack or
not at all. This Paper compare both IP
protocol on various platform to check pro and
cons .Also, paper discussed the various
Deployment Challenges for IPv6.
Keywords: IPv4, IPv6, Internet

I. Introduction
With the advancement of technology, Internet
is increasing day by day. In order to do
communication over internet IPv4 was
proposed to give a unique addressing for each
node on internet .But Limitation of IPv4
determines its fate that the internet supported
by it will be replaced by the new protocol
called IPv6.IPv6 is simply the upgraded
version of IPv4, and makes all the attempts to
overcome the drawback of the previous 4
version of Internet Protocol [2]. IPv6 protocol
which will replace IPv4 in near future is a
major boost to network technology as it has
many good qualities which IPv4 lacks. To
better understand the IPv6, it is very much
necessary to understand differences between
IPv6 and IPv4. IPv6 is yet under experimental
stage .Understanding of its improvement over
IPv4 will clear the various concept and
furnish the base for more refinement in
IPv6 .This paper takes a comparative

approach to study the level of performance of

IPv6 and IPv4.By carefully surveying the
different research paper which focused some
unique requirement and compared both IP
protocol, This paper present the gist of all
surveys done for readers. The rest of the paper
is organized as follows; Section II discusses
some of similar work undertaken by other
researchers in evaluating performance of IP
Protocol. Section III describes performance
analysis Both IP's mainly focusing some
important domain .Section IV give a
difference table which give a glance look at
differences in both IP protocol. Then we
discuss the deployment challenges of IPv6 in
Section V. Finally, conclusions from the
survey are drawn in Section VI.

II. Analysis
A. Security
IPv6 security is a large and complex subject.
The amount of attention that IPv6 security has
so far received is quite low and new
considerations will certainly be uncovered.
Without adequate training and attention on the
part of network operators to the new
considerations with Ipv6 security, it will be
very difficult to ensure a smooth transition to
IPv6 [17]. The default subnet size of an IPv6
subnet is 64 bits or 2 64 as compared to most
common subnet size in IPv4 of 8 bits or 28.
This increases the scan size to check each
host on a subnet by 2 ^64 - 28. IPv4 offers
IPSec support, but it is optional. Support for
IPSec in IPv6 implementations is not an
option but a requirement. Because IPv6
mandates the inclusion of IP Security (IPSec),
it has often been stated that IPv6 is more
secure than Ipv4.

B. Operating Systems [10, 11, 16]

Internet is a ubiquitous part of businesses and
individuals worldwide. With its popularity on
an incline, operating system vendors are
developing end-systems that support the new
version of Internet Protocol (IPv6) that
eventually will replace Ipv4 .Performance of
the IP stack and how it associates with
operating systems is critical to the efficiency
of all network related activities on any
computing infrastructure. Hence it is essential
to evaluate performance of IP stack with
different operating systems.For small packet
sizes, performance difference between IPv4
and IPv6 is lower than theoretical value of
approximately 10.3%. Both Windows XP and
Server 2003 have throughput difference of
approximately 5% evident for both TCP and
UDP traffic [10].For large packet sizes, IPv4
and IPv6 performance difference is higher
than the theoretical value of 1.3%. TCP traffic
on Windows Server 2003 shows a difference
of 10.4% and UDP traffic on Windows XP
shows 12% [11].In Window, Performance of
Ipv4 and IPv6 various with packet size and
has much diversity over range of packet size
conforming
a
sinusoidal
graph
of
throughput.Redhat9.0 implementation of the
IPv6 protocol stack has overall good
performance under Loop Back test bed. The
performance of IPv6 with FreeBSD4.9
deserves the next higher overall performance.
Windows2003 has comparatively poor
performance under Loop Back test bed [16].

C. Mobility
Mobile
IP
is
used
to
maintain
communications while the IP address is
changing. Mobile IPv6 is much optimized and
deployable than Mobile IPv4, like direct
communication between the correspondent
node and mobile device, even though Mobile
IPv6 is still uncompleted; the issues have
been with the security of the protocol. The
mobility problem was taken into account

when the IPv6 protocol was being designed,

so the mobility support is not an external
patch, but it is integrated in the protocol. Each
foreign agent requires a pool of directions,
what means shortage of addresses. IPv6 does
not require Foreign Agent (FA), as the mobile
node, with the auto configuration mechanism
of IPv6, is able to get an addressing the
foreign network without any external help.
Triangle routing of IPv4 is inefficient
(Correspondent node always sends packets to
HA, not directly to the mobile node). IPv6
avoids the triangle routing (correspondent
node sends packets directly to the mobile
node)
with
the
route
optimization
mechanism.IPv4 uses encapsulation for the
delivery of packets. In IPv6 the delivery is
realized by the Routing Header. The new
mechanism reduces overhead. Problems with
the firewalls avoided. Generation of an
excessive signalling is no longer needed. The
handoff time, which deteriorates the
communication, is reduced.

D. Quality of Service (QoS)

The quality of service is integrated in IPv6, as
there are 2 fields in the base header whose goal
is to ensure a certain QoS. These fields are the
traffic class, which substitutes the type of
service (TOS) field of IPv4, and the flow label,
and with them it is possible to give the packets
a certain characteristic under the point of view
of the QoS. Packet loss, throughput, delay,
jitter and response time of Ipv6 is much better
than Ipv4 and increase gradually with volume
of traffic [2] in IPv6 .
The goals to achieve by the quality of service
mechanisms are:

Real time applications

Less latency and jitter.
More tolerance to packet losses
Retransmissions are less important
More importance of the temporal
relationships

III.

IPv6 Deployment
Challenges

Resources available over IPv6 are not

reachable from an IPv4 node and vice
versa
Customer is least interested in IPv6.
He doesnt want to make any
investment in new hardware/Software
infrastructure. Customer asks for
services and content, not bother about
protocol used.
Person need to be trained to handle
issue coming while implementing
Ipv6 legacy has restricted large
deployment, slow and continuous
deployment is only possible.

Many critics has raised some serious

security concern many of which yet to
be resolve

IV.

Conclusion

Later but soon, Ipv6 is the future of

internet .Literature review, research paper are
showing that Ipv6 and superiority over IPv4.
Ipv6 is providing solution to many problems
which was faced in IPv6. Yet, there are many
aspects which need to be considered and
examine before Ipv6 become the full fledge
vehicle for driving internet traffic.
Deployment of Ipv6 is also a big challenge as
it has to go through many obstacles from
technical to social aspect of adaptation by end
user.

V. References
1) Savita Shiwani and G.N. Purohit , IPv4 Compared to IPv6 Networks for Recital Analysis
in OMNeT++ Environment , Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology
Network, Web & Security ,Volume 13 Issue 11 Version 1.0 Year 2013 .
2) Fyaza Nada , Performance Analysis of Mobile Ipv4 and Mobile Ipv6 , in The
International Arab journal of information technology , Vol. 4 ,No. 2 ,April 2007 .
3) Saaidal Razalli Bin Azzuhri and K. Daniel Wong ,Enabling Mobility in IPv6
Networks ,Malaysia University of Science and Technology, Malaysia ,2009 .
4) Monjur Ahmed, Alan T Litchfield, and Shakil Ahmed , VoIP Performance Analysis over
IPv4 and Ipv6 , Published in MECS I.J. Computer Network and Information Security,
2014, 11, 43-48 .
5) Dey, S and Shilpa, N. Issues in IPv4 to IPv6 Migration. International Journal of Computer
Applications in Engineering Sciences, 2011. 1(1): p. 9-13.
6) Shaneel Narayan, Samad S. Kolahi, Yonathan Sunarto, Du D. T. Nguyen and Paul Mani ,
Performance Comparison of IPv4 and IPv6 on Various Windows Operating Systems
,Proceedings of 11th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology
2008, Bangladesh

Appendices
Table 1. Difference between MIPv6 and MIPv4 [18]
Key Features
Mobile IPv4
Special router as foreign agent
Support for route optimization

Yes
Part of the
protocol

Mobile IPv6
No
In
Extensions

Ensure symmetric reach ability between mobile

nodes and its router at current location

No

Yes

Routing bandwidth overhead

More

Less

Decouple from Link Layer

No

Yes

Need to manage Tunnel soft state

Yes

No

Dynamic home agent address discovery

No

Yes

Table 2. IPv4 and IPv6 Difference Table

IPv4
Addresses are 32 bit length.
Addresses are numbers represented in
decimals.
IPSec support is only optional.
Fragmentations done by sender and
forwarding routers.
No packet flow identification.
Checksum field is available in IPv4 header
Options fields are available in IPv4 header.
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is
available to map IPv4 addresses to MAC
addresses.
Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP)
is used to manage multicast group
membership.
VI. Broadcast messages are available.
Manual configuration (Static) of IPv4
addresses or DHCP (Dynamic configuration)
is required to configure IPv4 addresses.

IPv6
Addresses are 128 bit length.
Addresses are numbers represented in
hexadecimals.
Inbuilt IPSec support.
Fragmentations done only by sender.
Packet flow identification is available within the
IPv6 header using the Flow Label field.
No checksum field in IPv6 header.
No option fields, but IPv6 Extension headers are
available.
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)is replaced
with a function of Neighbour Discovery Protocol
(NDP).
IGMP is replaced with Multicast Listener
Discovery (MLD) messages.
VII.
Broadcast messages are not
available. Instead a link-local scope "All
nodes multicast (FF02::1) is used for
broadcast similar functionality.
Auto-configuration of addresses is available.